A Case Study of Discussion Forums in Two Programming MOOCs on Different Platforms

In massive open online courses (MOOCs), discussion forums are used to facilitate learner interaction and provide a space for social learning. Some MOOC platforms, such as FutureLearn, are intentionally designed for social learning and encourage the use of discussion forums for learner-to-learner interaction. Other MOOC platform, such as EdX, focus more on presenting discussion forums primarily as a tool for asking questions. This study compared how learners enrolled in computer programming courses use discussion forums on these two different MOOC platforms. Each course had approximately 4700 learners who enrolled. Open coding was used to analyze the nature of the posts in the discussion forums, and subsequent analysis was done based on the categorization of each discussion thread. From the results, we found more participation in terms of the number of posts, learners posting, and learners responding for the FutureLearn course; however, few threads for either course had a deep level of discussion. Most posts in the FutureLearn course were social in nature or discussed course concepts, and most posts in the EdX course were social in nature or were about course assessments. We concluded that the discussion forums for the two MOOC platforms were used differently and tended to align with the role of the instructor and the design of the platform. However, the dominance of social posts and lack of in-depth discussion on both platforms suggests a need to investigate other methods of encouraging course content discussion.